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The smaller components become, the more difficult it is to create patterns in an economical and reproducible way, according to an interdisciplinary team of Penn State researchers who, using sound waves, can place nanowires in repeatable patterns for potential use in a variety of sensors, ...

The researchers characterize their new technique as a neat solution to the "needle in a haystack" problem of nanoscale microscopy, but it's more like the difference between finding the coffee table in a darkened room either by walking around until you fall over it, or using a flashlight. In a new ...

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory have fabricated transparent thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of ...

University of Illinois chemistry professor Alexander Scheeline wants to see high school students using their cell phones in class. Not for texting or surfing the Web, but as an analytical chemistry instrument.
Scheeline developed a method using a few basic, inexpensive supplies and a digital ...

The Dow Chemical Company (Dow) named Torsten Kraef as the new business group vice president of Dow Polyurethanes, a global business unit within Dow that includes the Propylene Oxide, Propylene Glycol, Isocyanates and Polyols businesses. He was named to the position in August.
Kraef has been ...

The development of new organic batteries—lightweight energy storage devices that work without the need for toxic heavy metals—has a brighter future now that chemists have discovered a new way to pass electrons back and forth between two molecules.
The research is also a necessary step toward ...

Because one of the main bottlenecks in determining the structure of protein molecules is producing good isolated single crystals, improved crystallization techniques would be useful in a wide range of genomics and pharmaceutical research. Research reported in The Journal of Chemical Physics uses ...

Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now some MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.
One of the problems with ...

To watch a magician transform a vase of flowers into a rabbit, it's best to have a front-row seat. Likewise, for chemical transformations in solution, the best view belongs to the molecular spectators closest to the action. Those special molecules comprise the "first solvation shell," and ...

Crazy bands are cool because no matter how long they've been stretched around a kid's wrist, they always return to their original shape, be it a lion or a kangaroo. Now a Duke and Stanford chemistry team has found a polymer molecule that's so springy it snaps back from stretching much smaller ...